


Choose life... again

by Anonymous



Category: Trainspotting (Movies), Trainspotting Series - Irvine Welsh
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Not Really Character Death, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26921383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: He has no idea what’s going on. One second he’s dying and the next second he’s coming off a high. He’s disoriented from the after effects of heroin use and it hasn’t really caught up to him yet, but he’s in the past.A path unknown where there once had been the certainty of events past but his return changes things and he doesn’t know if it's for better or for worse.
Kudos: 2
Collections: Anonymous





	Choose life... again

Lights are blaring, in the distance he can hear a siren, or is that just his head ringing? He doesn’t really know, someones trying to talk to him but it feels like he’s clawing through mud (or if you will, into the worst toilet in Scotland). Everything is a blur but for a moment he thinks he sees someone mouthing something at him. He looks panicked and scared, trying to say something to him but he can’t get past the fog in his head that blocks his words ‘I can’t understand you’, he wants to say ‘I can’t read your lips’, not that he can see them very clearly in the first place. But his words are caught in his throat as he chokes on air. The metallic taste of blood coats his tongue and makes him want to retch but he can’t, he can’t breathe and he can’t understand what is going on and all he wants is for everything to stop. Unconsciousness keeps tempting him further and further into its grasp and his vision is obscure and unfocused. The man keeps nudging him, jostling really - it’s quite jarring and annoying, to be honest, as he tries desperately to keep him awake. His nerves feel like they’re on fire, his chest is growing heavier and he CAN’T breathe.

Fear grips his heart as he feels the ever-growing presence of death near him, awaiting the moment his cords are cut and he falls stringless into its clutch. People often say that death is going to be like watching the camera reel of your life flash before your eyes. It’s not, not the promised flash of events that defined him as a person, moving from moment to moment, showing every opportunity and every crossroad in his path. It’s one moment captured in time, a still image that encapsulated his life, one of an opportunity and then a betrayal - the first one that is, or not quite the first but rather the greatest.

His whole life just felt like a downwards spiral, at first into drugs and then into leading a life where he felt like he didn’t belong, a life he was chained to, always aching for more but never quite reaching. Then again that is what ageing is, isn’t it? When you have to settle, it’s never quite the life of adventure you would imagine in youth. Life is… well, it’s turning at every crossroad, hoping for something new and only to find that you’ve hit dead-end after dead-ends; life is realising that there’s really only one path, the one that you’ve been leading up to, with every choice that’s set in stone.

Choose life! Ha! What a fucking joke!

Choose life! Choose falling in and out of addiction, always craving one more final hit. Choose trying and failing to lead a better life, and instead wallowing in an unfulfilling existence of lost hope and forgotten promises. Choose dreaming of a path never taken, of a different life, one that’s worth living and the one that you long for. Wake up to face the harsh reality of mediocrity and discontent. Pretend that everything is going to be okay, until you lose yourself in your delusions. Choose drowning in nostalgia and trying to forget that time never waits as you try to relive the glory days. Back in the days when you naively lived day to day, not caring for time when really, it’s time that doesn’t care for you. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a thousand others ways to spew your bile across people you've never met. Choose deadbeat marriages and wishing you could do it all over again. Choose low paid jobs, with impossible hours, that you hate and regret taking with every fibre of your being but have to rely on anyway. Or choose a zero-hour contract and a two hour journey to work, and choose the same for your kids, only worse, and maybe tell yourself that it's better that they never happened. Choose the slow reconciliation towards what you can get, rather than what you always hoped for. Settle for less and keep a brave face on it. Choose disappointment and choose losing the ones you love as they fall from view, a piece of you dies with them until you can see that one day in the future, piece by piece they will be all gone and there will be nothing left of you to call alive or dead. Choose and with every choice and every moment, take that one small step closer to the end until time catches up with you and all you have is forgotten moments, paths not taken and regret. Choose your future. Choose life.

In the end, there is an all encompassing darkness.

In the end, there is regret.

**Author's Note:**

> This my first fanfiction ever, so I hope you like it. I've just watched T1 and T2 recently and it got me kind of enamoured, to say the least. The complete lack of time travel fics for it, left me sorely disappointed hence this fic. Though I'm not really sure where I'm going to take it.
> 
> Thanks for reading :)


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